Sons of Gallifrey
by 3StagsProductions
Summary: "Sons of Gallifrey" is a prequel to "Doctor Who" and chronicles the events in the lives of the Doctor and the Master before they became enemies. It answers the question "Who is Who." "Sons of Gallifrey" will air as a series on YouTube beginning with the pilot episode, "The Harrison Effect."


Sons of Gallifrey

The shrill alarm shattered the silence in the darkened, efficiency apartment. The noise continued unabated for some time before the figure tangled in blanket began to stir.

Verity Lambert, a twenty-year-old student at NYU swatted blindly at her night stand trying to silence the alarm, knocking over a small lamp in the process. "All right," she groaned in frustration before finally pulling the covers from over her head. Her London accent had faded little in the year or so she'd been in the states.

Once the alarm was dealt with, she sat up with a huff, her hair a tangle of blond curls. She pushed back the blankets and swung her feet over the side of the bed, probing with her toes in an effort to find her slippers in the darkness. Verity was completely unaware of the thin, shadowy arms and hands, the impossibly long fingers reaching out from beneath the bed toward her legs.

"Ridiculous," she said in disgust before standing, a black mist swirly about her ankles.

In her faded, oversized t-shirt, she shuffled sleepily toward the door to the bathroom, banging into something and cursing under her breath. When she finally reached the bathroom and turned on the light she winced in the brightness. "Oh, God," she mumbled, "I look like death." Verity reached into the medicine cabinet and opened a prescription bottle. She took out one pill, placed it on her tongue and swallowed it expertly.

She stared blankly at her reflection in the harsh light emitted from the naked bulb as she brushed her teeth thoughtlessly. Her eyelids were heavy and nearly closed several times before she finished. When she leaned forward to rinse the toothpaste from her mouth her reflection disappeared from the mirror, and all around the door frame behind her, the long crept into view.

Long, black arms reached into the bathroom as if pulling themselves from the darkness. The hands were everywhere, high and low, straining, scratching against the walls. The room beyond was cloaked in an inky blackness.

Suddenly Verity stood upright again, her face dripping wet, blinking, water droplets weighing down her eye lashes. When she looked into the mirror, the black forms behind her were no longer there. She dried her face with a towel and pushed the door closed.

Outside the bathroom, where she could not see, the black forms were multiplying. They dragged themselves out from under her bed, from every corner and recess where shadows hid. They seemed to be made of shadow, born from it. With the room to themselves, they ventured further from the shadowy recesses, toward the light. At first just fingers, hands, and arms, now torsos began to appear, ethereal bodies, heads, seemingly made of mist. They looked vaguely human, but the proportions were wrong. Their long, languid shapes twisted in disturbing ways as crawled over the surfaces of the room, on the floor, over the walls, even clinging to the ceilings, making their way toward the stream of light that spilled through the almost closed door to the bathroom. The room was teeming with them, infested.

With a flash of light, the door opened and the creatures receded, vaporizing into a mist. Verity emerged from the room only slightly more awake. She turned on another light and began tossing clothes aside until she found a pair of faded jeans. She pulled them on underneath the t-shirt and buttoned them, and then she scanned the room hoping to find something else clean enough to wear to class. She was already running behind. Finally she saw a loose fitting cotton, gypsy style, peasant top. She pulled off the t-shirt and slipped into the new top. Verity had a bohemian style, lots of bracelets and necklaces, which she was already layering, looking around for her boots, a pair in suede with fringes.

For an instant, she thought she saw something move in the corner of the room, but when she looked that way, there was nothing. "Aah," she said, spotting the tip of one of her boots peeking out from beneath her bed. She hopped over and plopped down with a bounce on the corner of the bed, grabbing the boot and wriggling her foot into it. The other was under the bed and she groped blindly for it, her face contorting a bit as she tried to picture where it might be.

Under the bed, the creatures swarmed, reaching tentatively toward her hand, nearly touching her. When she managed to get hold of the second boot she had to tug with some force to free it from their grasp. Verity just thought it had bumped into something under there, maybe a book.

She put on the boot and grabbed her purse and keys. She was out the door and in the hallway in a moment, locking her apartment door behind her. Then she checked her watch, cursed again and took off running down the hall. Half way to the elevator Verity stopped in her tracks.

"Really?" she asked sarcastically.

She turned on her heels and rushed back to the apartment. Jiggling the key in the lock with some frustration she muttered, "Don't think you might need your books? Maybe?"

She pushed the door open and when she did a chill ran through her and she drew a quick gasp. The room was filled with shadows. Or were they people, animals? They moved in a strange, quirky, and disjointed fashion. They were fast, but they didn't seem to have a solid form. Whatever they were, they were watching her, every one of them. They had no eyes, no faces at all, but she knew they were watching. They stood for a moment, none of them moving, not the shadows, not Verity.

Then suddenly and without warning they lunged toward her in a swarm of coordinated movement. Instinctively she screamed and pulled the door shut behind her. Then she ran.

On another planet, some 250 million light years from the Earth, a planet called Gallifrey, two of the greatest Time Lords the universe has ever known were themselves concealed in the darkness. In the storied and hallowed halls of the Prydonian Academy, the Doctor and the Master were not asleep in their dormitory as they should have been. They were not preparing for their upcoming examinations. They were hiding in the shadows waiting for the ancient proctor who patrolled the halls to shuffle by.

Once the old man passes by and his quiet singing and the rustling of his robes fades away, the two young students creep out of the shadows. Their faces would be unrecognizable to anyone who knew them in later years. After all, they were just boys. They hadn't even taken their names yet. It would be many years before they would take on the names they would carry for centuries, many years before one would become a hero, and the other a monster.

Here, in this hallway, sneaking out of their dormitory in the middle of the night, hiding from the proctors, they were just friends, the best of friends, closer than brothers. They had nicknames for one another, boyhood nicknames, "Chalk," and "Vigg," names that would fade into oblivion soon enough.

Vigg crept silently toward the corner squinting in the darkness after the proctor. "He's gone," he whispered, "Let's go."

"Where are we going?" Chalk asked, trailing a bit behind.

"Shh!"

"But tell me where we're going… Vigg!" he called after him. Vigg was fairly running down the hall.

Vigg stopped and turned, whispering loudly, "Oh, do shut up! You're mewling like a little girl. Now, come on!" With that he was off again.

Chalk turned and looked down the hallway where the proctor had gone. "He is deceptively quick," he thought to himself before taking off after his friend.

The Prydonian Academy was the most prestigious of all the academies on Gallifrey. It produced more high ranking officials than any other, indeed, more Presidents of Gallifrey came through the Prydonian than all other academies combined. But the academies did more than produce influential leaders. They trained Time Lords, travelers in time and space. The Time Lords liked to say that they never interfered in the affairs of other planets and civilizations, but this simply wasn't true. Over the years, they had stepped in on countless occasions. In truth, their power and influence were completely unchecked, and the Prydonian Academy was the most powerful of all.

Inside the Prydonian was a room, more than a room, really, an expanse, so large as have its own weather systems. Without climactic regulators, it could rain inside the "Hangar." The Hangar was where the Time Lords stored, maintained, and modified the machines that took them anywhere and anywhen in the universe. Within this expanse there were millions of these machines, lined up like soldiers waiting for their orders. In the Hangar, they sat motionless, quiet, in their resting state. As such they all looked similar, large, metallic cubes, engraved with Gallifreyan writing in three languages, the old, High Gallifreyan, New Gallifreyan, and a mathematical, formulaic translation. These engravings identified the model type and number of every single TARDIS.

TARDIS is of course an acronym. It stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space, and it is what Time Lords call their machines , their ships.

When the door opened into the Hangar, the sound echoed for what seemed an eternity in the cavernous space. Vigg and Chalk slipped inside and their foot falls too echoed.

"Vigg," Chalk whispered, "this is a restricted area."

"You don't know that."

"It's the Hangar! Everyone knows it's restricted."

"That's really more of a suggestion," Vigg argued, "It's not as though it's set in stone."

"It is set in stone."

"Can you support that?"

"Yeah," Chalk said flatly, "I can. For a start, the door was locked."

Vigg shrugged, "Lots of doors are locked."

"And there was a sign that said,"

Vigg interrupted, "Look," he sounded irritated, "if you're gonna take the time to read every sign we come across, we're never gonna get anywhere. Now, come on."

With that, Vigg took off running into the rows of TARDISes, his footsteps echoing as he goes. Chalk hesitated for a moment, but eventually decided to follow. After dodging in and out of the seemingly endless rows and columns, Vigg stopped at one of the machines.

"Here we are," he said, grinning.

"Where?"

Vigg knocks on the surface of the TARDIS. "What do you think?"

"About what?"

"This," said Vigg, gesturing grandly to the TARDIS.

"It's a TARDIS," Chalk saud, unimpressed. "A rubbish TARDIS too, by the look of it."

And he was right. The surface of the TARDIS was scratched and dented, scorched and burnt. Undeterred, Vigg reached into his jacket pocket and produced, with great flourish, a key. He slid the key into the lock and pushed the door open with a creak.

Chalk's eyes widened, "Where did you get a key?"

Vigg was grinning, "Toby. He owed me a favour after the thing with the shoes."

Chalk sighed in disbelief. He rolled his eyes, "Great," he said, "well, let's just add that to the growing list of honour violations, shall we?"

Vigg scoffed. "You hair's an honour violation. Come one." He moved to step inside.

"Wait," Chalk protested, "I'm not getting in there. That's a Type 40. They're crap to begin with and this one's falling apart as we stand here. There's a reason they're scrapping all of them."

Vigg stopped and turned back to Chalk, "Oy, I've always said that. I'm the one who's always saying they're rubbish. You're the one who's always waxing poetic about the 'golden days of time travel,' and how great the Type 40s are, how much character they have."

"Well, yeah," Chalk fired back, "When they've been restored. Not where they're like… like this."

"Yeah, all right. It's a banger, but that's what so great. No one's gonna miss it. Besides, I've been fixing it up a bit."

"Oh, well, so long as you've been 'fixing it up' I'm sure that," Chalk paused for a moment. His brow knitted. "What do you mean, 'No one's gonna miss it?' You're not seriously suggesting we take this thing somewhere?"

"Come on," Vigg said, already inside the TARDIS.

"Vigg!" he shouted, suddenly frightened by his own echo. He whispered, "You come out of there right now!"

There was no answer from inside the TARDIS. Chalk could hear the sounds of the TARDIS's start-up procedures. Vigg was actually planning on taking this beat up old box out of the Hangar."

"I cannot believe this," he muttered to himself.

The door swung open with a sharp creak. "Well? Come on!" Then Vigg disappeared back inside the machine.

Chalk hung his head in defeat. "This is a prodigiously bad idea," he said before stepping through the door and closing it behind him.

Inside the metal cube, the TARDIS was immense. This was the first thing that anyone noticed upon entering. It was impossibly large inside. The dimensional stabilizers allowed for this. There has been much discussion as to the actual interior size of a TARDIS, but the truth is, with unlimited power, the size can be unlimited as well. The old Type 40s were fairly underpowered compared with the newer models, so they were smaller inside that the others. This combined with the Type 40's penchant for erratic and unpredictable behavior is exactly where they've all been decommissioned. But even with the limitations of this model, the interior was staggering.

The control console sat in the center of a circular room roughly the diameter of the Pantheon in Rome, some 45 meters across. When Chalk looked upward he saw the spiraling, metal catwalks that circled the cylindrical space, stretching upward, higher and higher until they disappeared into the darkness.

The floor of the control room was littered with debris, broken and spare components, old furniture, books, papers, manuals, even clothing. It resembled an abandoned building, and in fact, that's exactly what it was.

Vigg was working furiously at the controls, "Well, hurry up! These aren't meant to be flown solo."

"Are you mad?" Chalk asked in irritation and wonder, "You're not seriously considering – Do you even know if this thing works?"

"Only one way to find out," he shouted. Then he pulled a lever and the entire TARDIS shifted hard to one side sending Chalk tumbling into a pile of debris. Vigg himself was barely able to hold on as the TARDIS's engines ground and groaned to life.

Chalk scrambled to his feet and rushed to the control console. He shut down the engines. "Vigg! This is madness!"

"Oy, why did you do that? You're gonna break it!"

"It sounds broken already!" Chalk protested, "You can't do this!"

"Well, certainly not if you keep turning it off." Vigg was resetting the instruments.

"We need to go back."

Vigg stopped what he's doing. He looked up at Chalk, serious for the first time, "We're Time Lords, Chalk. Do you really want to spend the next who knows how many years at the Academy? Maybe one day become a Chancellor? You could wear a big hat? That would be exciting, wouldn't it?"

"We might get our chance one day. When we're ready. When we graduate. When we actually become Time Lords."

Vigg scoffed, "Might, might, might. This is our chance, right now, right here. Tell me you don't want to see what's out there, actually live what you've been reading about in your precious books."

Chalk is wavering. He knew he should leave, but the truth is he didn't want to. "This isn't right, Vigg."

Vigg steps around the console and puts a hand on Chalks shoulder. He looks at his oldest friend with sincerity, "One trip, one time, me and you. One grand adventure like we talked about when we were boys." He pauses for a moment, remembering their childhood, "Those days are nearly gone now, I know that. We're not boys any longer. Soon enough we'll take our places as serious men. Our lives will be all about doing the proper thing at the proper time. Politics and policies. How many Gallifreyans ever get to travel? How may? The truth is we may never get another chance, ever. I have to do this. _We _have to do this. What would a grand adventure be without my best mate?"

There is a long pause as Chalk considered his friend's words. He knew he should go back. He knew that if he did, his friend would come back with him. He also knows that Vigg is right. He took a deep breath and let it out with disgust.

"One trip?" he asked, "one time?"

Vigg grinned wildly, "Promise."

"All right," Chalk said, "but after this we come back. We come back to this exact moment and we return to our studies, deal?"

"Deal!" Vigg shook his friend's hand vigorously and then they embraced, laughing like children.

"Okay, okay, okay," Chalk was fairly shouting over Vigg's jubilant laughter, "where do we go?"

"Where else?"

Chalk's eyes narrowed, "Yeah?"

Before Vigg can answer, a noise from outside the TARDIS snapped them back to the moment. It was the old proctor.

"Hello?" he was calling out in his weak and raspy voice, "is there anyone there?"

Vigg and Chalk looked at one another wide eyed, then, again, like children began pushing and shoving nearly tumbling over their own feet to get to the control console.

"Go! Go!" Chalk was shouting in his loudest whisper.

"Adjust the vestors!" Vigg shouted back.

"You watch your stabilizers! You're listing!"

"I know what I'm doing," Vigg snapped back, "just lock in your vectors."

The TARDIS's engines engaged and it listed heavily to the side, again sending debris and furniture tumbling.

"Stabilizers!" Chalk shouted.

"Shut up!"

Outside, the TARDIS was disappearing from its docking port. By the time the old proctor reached the location, there was nothing left. He stood for a moment looking at the empty space before him then shook his head.

"There're always a few. In every class, there're always a few."

He turned to walk away, his feet shuffling lightly, "Perfectly good night ruined with paperwork."

"Sons of Gallifrey" is a prequel to "Doctor Who" and chronicles the events in the lives of the Doctor and the Master before they became enemies. It answers the question "Who is Who." The first episode of "Sons of Gallifrey," "The Harrison Effect," will air on YouTube as a multi-part, audio drama. To see the promo video for the upcoming season, go to YouTube and subscribe to the channel:

user/FanFicTV/videos

And for the latest news, follow us on Twitter at:

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